Related

Syrian troops ambushed a large group of rebels Wednesday trudging through what once was a secret route through a desert road northeast of Damascus, killing more than 60 fighters in a barrage of machine-gun fire and leaving their bodies in the sand.
State television claimed those killed came from an al-Qaeda-linked group that has joined the battle against President Bashar al-Assad, whose troops are trying to drive opposition forces from areas surrounding his seat of power in the capital.

BEIRUT — Syrian government warplanes bombed rebel positions near a strategic northern city on Tuesday, activists said, as international inspectors toured production and storage sites of the country’s chemical weapons arsenal.
The rebels captured Maaret al-Numan a year ago, after systematically seizing the army’s outposts in the city, along astride a major supply route linking the capital, Damascus with the contested Idlib region and Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

An Al-Qaeda faction in Syria is committing appalling atrocities in areas under its control, Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday that urged the group to end its “reign of abuse.”
Amnesty called on Turkey and the Gulf States to cut off the supply of arms and money to the hardline group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which holds key parts of northern Syria.

Syria's government on Tuesday accused rebel forces of using chemical weapons for the first time, but the opposition denied the claim, saying instead that government forces might have used banned weapons. "Terrorists fired rockets containing chemical materials on Khan al-Assal in Aleppo province," the state news agency SANA and Syrian state television said.

Few thought that the Syrian regime’s promise to destroy its chemical weapons would be the end of the story. Brigadier-General Zaher al-Saket, a former chemical weapons chief in President Bashar al-Assad’s own army, certainly did not.

BEIRUT — Syria’s Western-backed opposition plunged into disarray on Sunday as its president resigned and its military leader refused to recognize a prime minister recently elected to lead an interim rebel government.

Human Rights Watch: Syrian rebels committed war crimes, killed civilians in planned attack BEIRUT (AP) — Jihadi-led rebel fighters in Syria killed at least 190 civilians and abducted more than 200 during an offensive against pro-regime villages, committing a war crime, an international human rights group said Friday.

Syrian forces claimed to be massing for a major assault on Aleppo Sunday after sweeping through the last rebel holdouts around Qusair in the west of the country.
News outlets close to the Syrian regime and the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, which has come to its support, said that “Operation Northern Storm” to retake Aleppo, the biggest city, and the surrounding countryside, had begun. Other sources told the AFP news agency the battle would start in “the coming days or hours.”

UNITED NATIONS — A group of armed fighters linked to the Syrian opposition detained more than 20 U.N. peacekeepers Wednesday in the increasingly volatile zone separating Israeli and Syrian troops on the Golan Heights.
The U.N. Security Council demanded their immediate and unconditional release.